A group of major Hollywood studios plus Amazon and Netflix have won a preliminary injunction against TickBox TV, a Kodi-powered streaming device. The device seller is ordered to keep pirate addons out of its box and halt all piracy-inducing advertisements. In addition, both parties are instructed to resolve several outstanding questions and update the injunction accordingly. Kodi-powered set-top boxes are a great way to to stream video content to a TV, but sellers who ship these devices with unauthorized add-ons give them a bad reputation. According to the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE), an anti-piracy partnership comprised of Hollywood studios, Netflix, Amazon, and more than two dozen other companies, Tickbox TV is one of these bad actors. Last year, ACE filed a lawsuit against the Georgia-based company, which sells Kodi-powered set-top boxes that stream a variety of popular media. According to ACE, these devices are nothing more than pirate tools, allowing buyers to stream copyright-infringing content and being advertised as such. The coalition, therefore, asked the court for an injunction to prevent Tickbox from facilitating copyright infringement by removing all pirate add-ons from previously sold devices. This week US District Court Judge Michael Fitzgerald issued a preliminary injunction, which largely sides with the movie companies. According to the Judge, there is sufficient reason to believe that Tickbox can be held liable for inducing copyright infringement. One of the claims is that Tickbox promoted its service for piracy purposes, and according to the Judge the movie companies provided enough evidence to make this likely. This includes various advertising messages the box seller used. “There is ample evidence that, at least prior to Plaintiffs’commencement of this action, TickBox explicitly advertised the Device as a means to accessing unauthorized versions of copyrighted audiovisual content,” Judge Fitzgerald writes. In its defense, Tickbox argued that it merely offered a computer which users can then configure to their liking. However, the Judge points out that the company went further, as it actively directed its users to install certain themes (builds) to watch movies, TV and sports. “Thus, the fact that the Device is just a ‘computer’ that can be used for infringing and noninfringing purposes does not insulate TickBox from liability if [..] the Device is actually used for infringing purposes and TickBox encourages such use.” Taking these and several other factors into account, the Court ruled that a preliminary injunction is warranted at this stage. After the lawsuit was filed, Tickbox already voluntarily removed much of the inducing advertisements and addons, and this will remain so. The preliminary injunction compels TickBox to the current version of the user interface, without easy access to pirate add-ons. The devices should no longer contain links to any of the themes and addons that the movie companies have flagged as copyright infringing. Tickbox had argued that a broad injunction could shut down its business, but the court counters this. Customers will still be able to use the box for legitimate purposes. If they are no longer interested it suggests that piracy was the main draw. “[A]n injunction of this scope will not ‘shut down Defendant’s business’ as TickBox contends. In the event that such an injunction does shut TickBox down, that will be indicative not of an unjustifiably burdensome injunction, but of a nonviable business model,” Judge Fitzgerald writes. The preliminary injunction is not final yet as there are several questions still unanswered. It’s unclear, for example, if and how Tickbox should remove addons from previously sold devices. The Court, therefore, instructs both parties to attempt to reach agreement on these outstanding issues, to include them in an updated injunction. The above findings are preliminary and apply specifically to the injunction request and the case itself will continue. However, the Court’s early opinion suggests that Tickbox has plenty of work ahead to prove its innocence. — A copy of the preliminary injunction is available here (pdf), and Judge Fitzgerald’s findings can be found here (pdf). Source: Torrentfreak.com

Karma police, arrest this sysadmin. Security researchers have discovered the website belonging to iconic British miserablists, Radiohead, has been leaking every single IP address to have visited it between 2011 and 2013. https://twitter.com/MayhemDayOne/sta...26657581441024 The flaw was discovered by Cologne-based infosec firm, Kromtech Security. According to Bob Diamchenko, the firm’s Head of Communications, the logs are still available on an unprotected Amazon S3 bucket. There’s more than 14 gigabytes worth in total. As leaks go, this one’s pretty tepid, and doesn’t contain anything earth-shatteringly dangerous, like usernames and passwords. It contains the user’s IP address, the time it accessed the site, the server response, the GET query, and browser information. According to Diamchenko, some of the GET queries could prove helpful for those looking for sensitive information. He sent me a redacted GET query containing a link to what appears to be a secure login to a website. 217.33.XXX.XXX – – [09/Dec/2013:10:43:50 +0000] “GET //inc/jquerymobile/jquery.mobile-1.3.2.min.js HTTP/1.1” 200 145396 “https://secure.XXXXX.com/login” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/31.0.1650.63 Safari/537.36” Diamchenko has cause to be a paranoid android. Many of the most high-profile data leaks we’ve seen over the past few years have been a product of individuals uploading sensitive information to Amazon S3 buckets that are improperly secured. In October of 2017, MacKeeper searchers discovered open S3 buckets containing the personal information of over 1,000 NFL players and their agents, the details of three million WWE fans, and the blood test records of over 150,000 Americans. Hackers managed to access these with no alarms and no surprises. The issue is so common, MacKeeper has even released a tool that helps sysadmins identify weak links in their S3 bucket setups. Sadly, nobody told the notoriously tech-savy band, who released their album In Rainbows on Bittorrent back in 2007. We reached out to Radiohead’s PR agency for comment. If we hear back from them, we’ll let you know.

We will for sure crush the target of 30 000 perfect FLACs, as we are well ahead of the deadline Feb. 5th - which means that as soon as we hit 30k, the challenge will be extended for another month! Thank you to everyone who has contributed enormous amounts of time! We must also give a super special thank you, which goes out to the top four uploaders: greenxeyezz, BlueVelvet, adeadcrab and ravana, who have 2532, 2236, 2000 and 1968 perfect FLAC uploads, respectively. Thats 8736 perfect FLACs by FOUR people! Let's crush this freeleech target, it is really not that hard, the 250th uploader has 12 perfect FLAC uploads... if everyone would have uploaded at least 7 albums each, we would have demolished the 200k perfect FLACs target by now!!!

TickBox, a streaming video platform, suffered a major setback on Tuesday as a federal judge issued an injunction intended to block the company from providing copyrighted content. The six major studios, plus Netflix and Amazon, filed suit in October as part of a broader crackdown on OTT devices that use Kodi addon software. The studios also sought a preliminary injunction that would force TickBox to impound all the devices it has sold, effectively shuttering the company. In his ruling on Tuesday, Judge Michael Fitzgerald did not go as far as the studios wanted. TickBox contends that it has already removed the infringing addons from its device, and Fitzgerald’s order requires only that the company maintain the status quo. But in his order, Fitzgerald also rejects TickBox’s primary line of defense — that is merely a hardware company, and is no more responsible for copyright infringement than any other computer manufacturer. Fitzgerald notes that TickBox advertised its product as a means to “cut the cord,” and explicitly offered access to live sports, Hollywood movies and other copyrighted material. The company also offered users step-by-step instructions on downloading the requisite software. “There is sufficient evidence that the Device can be and is used to access infringing content, and there is sufficient evidence of TickBox’s fault – primarily in the form of its advertisements and customer-support efforts,” Fitzgerald writes. “TickBox may be held responsible for the instances of infringement that would not have otherwise occurred in the absence of the Device.” In opposing the studios’ motion for an injunction, TickBox argued that it would put the company out of business. Fitzgerald issued the preliminary injunction and then urged both sides to agree to a further injunction that would bar the distribution of copyrighted material while allowing TickBox to continue any non-infringing activity. “Assuming the Device is useful for purposes other than accessing infringing content, an injunction of this scope will not ‘shut down Defendant’s business’ as TickBox contends,” Fitzgerald writes. “In the event that such an injunction does shut TickBox down, that will be indicative not of an unjustifiably burdensome injunction, but of a nonviable business model.” The six major studios that form the Motion Picture Association of America have joined with Netflix and Amazon to fight piracy under the banner of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment. Following the TickBox suit, the group also filed suit earlier this month against the makers of the Dragon Box, a similar device. That case is also pending in Fitzgerald’s Court. https://www.scribd.com/document/3703...ion#from_embed

The court ordered TickBox to maintain certain changes it made to its user interface and advertising after the studios sued. Major Hollywood studios and streamers won an early battle in a copyright fight with TickBox on Tuesday. A California federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against the streaming device manufacturer to pause further potential infringement while the litigation plays out. Universal, Columbia, Disney, 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros., Amazon and Netflix in October sued TickBox, claiming the company's hardware allows mass infringement of their copyrighted works — including access to titles that weren't yet available for legitimate in-home viewing. U.S. District Judge Michael Fitzgerald on Tuesday issued a preliminary injunction that orders TickBox to maintain certain changes it made to its user interface and advertising after the studios sued. Fitzgerald weighed the studios' likelihood of success on the merits of the claim, analyzing the device-maker's argument that it shouldn't be liable for the third-party conduct. TickBox argues it only offers hardware, on which users can "voluntarily install legitimate or illegitimate software," and that access to the infringing content came from downloadable "themes" that it didn't create. The court wasn't persuaded. "TickBox obviously has not 'caused' third parties to broadcast Plaintiffs’ (or others’) copyrighted works over the internet, at least in any direct sense," writes Fitzgerald. "But TickBox, through the Device, has delivered to those third parties viewers they would not otherwise have had, broadening those third parties’ audiences and the scope of their infringement. TickBox may be held responsible for the instances of infringement that would not have otherwise occurred in the absence of the Device." Fitzgerald also presented a series of technical questions, including whether TickBox has the ability to issue a software update that would reset devices and remove offending themes and add-ons that had been previously downloaded by customers. He wants the parties to work together with those questions in mind to file a stipulated preliminary injunction order that would replace this one by Feb. 7. If they can't reach an agreement, each side must submit its own proposed order by Feb. 12. (Read his full analysis below.) The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, a coalition of entertainment companies dedicated to fighting piracy that spearheaded the litigation, issued a statement Tuesday in response to the decision: “This is an important step, particularly given the Court’s conclusion that the ACE members are likely to succeed on the merits of their case. We look forward to further developments in this case.”

Found freeleech so thought to share this news.

Clint Eastwood To Direct, Produce, and Star In “The Mule” at Warner Bros. - Will Play 90-Year-Old Drug Mule Leo Sharp Just as his new film The 15:17 to Paris chugs into theaters, Clint Eastwood is circling THE MULE at Warner Bros. and Imperative Entertainment, the Tracking Board has exclusively learned. The Hollywood legend plans to direct, produce and star as 90-year-old drug courier Leo Sharp, according to multiple sources. The New York Times Magazine ran a story on Sharp in June 2014, and by November that same year, Imperative had acquired the article by Sam Dolnick, and tapped Ruben Fleischer (Gangster Squad) to direct and produce the film. At the time, Deadline reported that the producers were looking for a writer to tell this peculiar story, and oh, what a story it is! Sharp was an award-winning horticulturist and decorated WWII veteran known for his prized day lilies when he was busted for running drugs for Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, and sent to prison at the age of 90. He was transporting $3 million worth of cocaine through Michigan in his beat-up old pickup truck when he was arrested by the DEA. Sharp was sentenced to just three years after his lawyer argued that his client’s dementia sent him down the wrong path. We’ve heard that Eastwood’s Gran Torino scribe Nick Schenk wrote the initial draft of the script, which has since been rewritten by Weeds writer Dave Holstein. Should Eastwood officially sign on, he would likely produce via his Malpaso banner along with Imperative’s Dan Friedkin and Bradley Thomas. The Mule is expected to be Eastwood’s next film at Warner Bros., which has been the filmmaker’s home for years, and will release The 15:17 to Paris on Feb. 9. Warner Bros. does not comment on Eastwood projects, and declined to comment on this article several weeks ago. A representative for Imperative Entertainment did not respond to a request for comment. The company recently made the best of a bad situation when it supported Ridley Scott’s decision to replace Kevin Spacey with Christopher Plummer in All the Money in the World, for which Plummer received an Oscar nomination. Eastwood had been developing an adaptation of Jessica Buchanan’s book Impossible Odds before he abruptly switched gears and decided to move full steam ahead on The 15:17 to Paris, which stars the actual heroes who saved the titular train from a terrorist attack. He has not showed any signs of slowing down at age 87, and has not indicated any plans to retire following the release of Paris. Source: Tracking-Board So glad that Clint Eastwood is still at it... this should be great!

Ezra Swerdlow, ’21 Jump Street’ and ‘Spaceballs’ Producer, Dies at 64 Longtime New York film producer Ezra Swerdlow died of complications from pancreatic cancer and ALS on Jan. 23 in Boston. He was 64. Swerdlow amassed more than two dozen producing credits on feature films, including “Spaceballs,” “Hannah and Her Sisters,” “Waiting to Exhale,” “Wag the Dog,” “Enchanted,” “Zombieland,” “21 Jump Street,” and “The Equalizer.” Swerdlow was the son of Amy and Stanley Swerdlow, and grew up in Great Neck, N.Y. He attended Hampshire College, where he met his wife, Lindsey Hicks, and studied political theory at Rutgers University. In 1979, he was hired by a friend as a location scout on the Woody Allen film “Stardust Memories.” Swerdlow then worked on “Arthur” as a unit production manager, on “Tootsie” as a location manager, and on “Zelig,” “The King of Comedy,” and “Broadway Danny Rose” as a unit manager. He was an associate producer on “Radio Days.” He briefly moved to Los Angeles in the late 1980s and collaborated with Mel Brooks on “Spaceballs,” but primarily worked in New York City. In 2011, Swerdlow was nominated for an Emmy award for producing the HBO movie “Too Big to Fail.” Swerdlow is survived by his wife Lindsey, son Nick, daughter-in-law Caroline, sisters Joan and Lisa, brother-in-law Rob, and brother Tommy. Source: Variety

'Bad Boys for Life' would reunite Will Smith and Martin Lawrence. Is it time for Bad Boys to report for duty once more? Sony is taking another shot at making a Bad Boys sequel and is in early negotiations with directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah to helm, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed. The filmmakers would take on Bad Boys for Life, which would reunite Will Smith and Martin Lawrence for a third chapter in the buddy-cop film series. The duo played Miami police detectives in the first two installments, which were directed by Michael Bay. The pair of films, released in 1995 and 2003, took in a collective $414.7 million worldwide. A third Bad Boys effort has been in development for years, with Joe Carnahan most recently attached to direct before exiting last March. El Arbi and Fallah were born in Morocco and studied film in Belgium. They recently directed episodes of FX crime drama Snowfall and have their third feature Gangsta due out this year.

The actor first played thirty-something-year-old Jesus 14 years ago. Jim Caviezel is poised to reprise his role as Jesus Christ in the upcoming sequel to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. ICM Partners, which represents Caviezel, confirmedon Tuesday that the actor is in negotiations with Gibson, who would presumably produce, direct or both. THR first reported 20 months ago that a sequel was in the works, but it wasn't known until Tuesday whether Gibson was interested in again casting Caviezel as Jesus. The actor, 49, first played thirty-something-year-old Jesus 14 years ago. In 2016, Randall Wallace, who was nominated for an Academy Award for scripting Braveheart for Gibson, was writing a first script for what is being called The Passion of the Christ: Resurrection, thoughit was unclear on Tuesday whether he was still involved in the project. Wallace told THR in 2016 that his script was for "a huge and sacred subject," and five months later Gibson revealed the name of the sequel during an interview on CBS' The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Gibson indicated then that the film might not be released until late 2019 or early 2020, "because it's a big subject." Long before then, Caviezel will appear in another film based on the Bible: Paul, Apostle of Christ, which Affirm Films, the faith-based label from Sony, will open March 28. The pic stars James Faulkner as Paul and Caviezel as Luke. A trailer is below. Gibson's original Passion of the Christ was released by Newmarket Films in 2004 and earned an impressive $612 million worldwide on just a $30 million production budget. It was practically assumed Gibson would some day make a sequel, but after about a decade passed, others decided to do it without him, and several competing projects that would tell the story of the Resurrection were thrust into preproduction. Thus far, only one meaningful production, Risen, from Sony, has come to fruition. Made with no involvement from Gibson, Risen earned $46 million worldwide on a $20 million budget.

Ant-Man and the Wasp' marks the studio's 20th first-look since the world glimpsed Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark. Tuesday's teaser for Ant-Man and the Wasp is a milestone moment for Marvel Studios and its fans. Not only is it ringing in the Disney-owned studio's 10th anniversary in style, it marks the 20th teaser trailer since the studio launched with 2008's Iron Man. But how does the teaser stand up to the first glimpses of the previous 19 movies? Here’s your chance to find out, by revisiting the original trailers of each of the many Marvel movies to date. Iron Man (2008)

The character is poised to be a breakout for the Marvel universe. It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it debut, but the first trailer for this summer’s Ant-Man and the Wasp debuted one of the movie’s antagonists, the Ghost — a character so in tune with the times that it just might become the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s next breakout character. The movie Ghost is already guaranteed to have some differences from its comic book inspiration — if nothing else, the character will be played by Ready Player One and Tomb Raider’s Hannah John-Kamen, while the comic book Ghost is male. But the original character is one who easily fits into the Ant-Man movie ethos, despite coming from Iron Man comic books, thanks to the guiding principle: All corporations are unethical, and must be destroyed. To be fair, that wasn’t always what the Ghost was about. When he first appeared in 1987’s Iron Man No. 217 — created by David Micheline and Bob Layton — the Ghost was a little bit more confused in his aims. Sure, he had an internal monologue that actually included the words, “I must destroy this company! I… neeeeeded to!” but he would, just one issue later, be revealed to be a particularly dedicated corporate spy who was happy to accept payment from one corporation to dismantle another. In his defense, his costume was a high-tech suit of armor that allowed him to become intangible and invisible — hence the name — and those tend to be pretty pricey in terms of upkeep. Although the Ghost had a reasonably successful run as a generic supervillain throughout the late 1980s and early ‘90s, the character received a dramatic makeover in both visuals and attitude in 2006, when reappearing as part of the Thunderbolts comic book series. Under the guidance of writers Andy Diggle and Jeff Parker, the new-style Ghost was newly paranoid, newly political — specifically, violently anti-capitalist and dedicated to the destruction of all corporations — and, curiously enough, newly unclear about whether or not he was even really human anymore. Part of that was down to the fact that the Ghost was rarely, if ever, seen out of a costume that obscured his entire body, but a newly revealed origin story suggested that he was part-cyborg as the result of a failed murder attempt while he was hooked up to multiple computer systems. What was far more clear was the increased focus of obsession the Ghost had for his mission: After Tony Stark explained that his business interests were far smaller than they were previously, the Ghost simply decided that small businesses are fine and Stark wasn’t worth hunting down anymore. Massive corporations, very specifically, were the enemy — and everything else was not worth his time. This attitude makes the use of the Ghost in Ant-Man and the Wasp a sensible one on one level; it is, after all, the sequel to a movie where the central plot focused on the control of a tech company and the abuse of its intellectual property. Given that the new pic will also introduce Walton Goggins as Sonny Burch, another villainous comic book CEO — and another villain from Iron Man comic books, curiously enough — as the film’s primary threat, it only makes sense that a character dedicated to ending corporate power structures would be involved. The question is, will the Marvel Cinematic Universe Ghost definitely be a villain? More to the point, regardless of whether they’re intended to be a bad guy, will an audience suspicious of corporate interests and “big money” treat them as one, as long as they try to take down the rich guys? Ant-Man and the Wasp is set to open July 6.

"I hope people will watch this movie and see the hero in themselves," said star Chadwick Boseman. Director Ryan Coogler was treated like a king at Monday's Black Panther premiere. Enthusiasm was high ahead of the screening at the Dolby Theatre, and Coogler earned a sustained standing ovation when he took the stage to introduce the cast of his Marvel Studios film, including his leading man Chadwick Boseman, frequent collaborator Michael B. Jordon, Lupita Nyong’o, Danai Gurira, Martin Freeman, Daniel Kaluuya, Letitia Wright, Winston Duke, Angela Bassett, Forest Whitaker, Andy Serkis and Sterling K. Brown. "He's a very, very honest director. He'll tell you what he believes in," Boseman told THR of his director. "You trust what he's saying, because he lives it, he's dreaming about it. He's willing to put himself through sickness in order to get the right thing on the screen." Coogler, Boseman and many other castmembers wore clothing honoring the film's African's roots, while the (royal) purple carpet was flanked by Black Panther's all-female bodyguards the Dora Milaje and was lit by futuristic lamps worthy of Wakanda, which is the most technologically advanced nation in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Black Panther, which focuses on T'Challa's (Boseman) coming to terms with becoming king, is the most diverse Marvel Studios film ever, and on the carpet, stars spoke of the importance of representation in film. "I hope people will watch this movie and see the hero in themselves. Even if it's a white person who sees it, if they can see a black character and identify with them, it changes a little bit about how our society is," said Boseman. One particularly enthusiastic section of the Dolby Theatre featured a score of directors, including Marvel filmmakers Taika Waititi, James Gunn, Jon Watts, Peyton Reed, Joe and Anthony Russo, Jon Favreau and Joss Whedon. Also nearby were Ava DuVernay, Elizabeth Banks, Kumail Nanjiani, Emily V. Gordon, Donald Glover and Josh Gadd. Boseman's co-star Kaluuya was fresh off landing a best actor Oscar nomination last week for Get Out, Jordan Peele's acclaimed horror film that put issues of race in America in the spotlight. "The reason I do the films is because I believe in them. Because I believe in them and I want to watch them," he told THR. "I kind of have to remove myself from it. In the bigger picture, though, what's the script saying? What's the story saying? What's the politics saying?" For those who weren't in attendance, here's a sampling of the reaction that circulated online after the screening. Black Panther opens Feb. 16.

Starting this summer, movie screeners and promo materials no longer can be directly sent to AMPAS members, but instead must go through mailing houses that the Academy will select and then furnish with contact information for members. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has adopted a new awards season policy that will affect its 7,258 voting members, whose mailboxes are filled with awards season mailings each fall, and the awards consultants behind those mailings. This morning, THR has learned, the Academy is holding a meeting at its Beverly Hills headquarters with publicists who work on awards campaigns to brief them on a new policy approved by the organization's 54-person board of governors at its Dec. 5 meeting: after the 90th Oscars on March 4, filmmakers and distributors will no longer be able to mail screeners, screening notices or invitations, screenplays, CDs or any other promotional materials directly to Academy members. Instead, starting in the summer, the Academy will require that these sorts of items be sent via third-party mailing houses that the Academy will select and furnish with the correct contact information for those of its members who opt to receive such material. The Academy has always closely guarded its membership list, and awards consultants have always sought to reach Academy members. For as long as there have been screeners, some awards consultants have made a business out of cobbling together lists of Academy members' addresses (which often contain incomplete or outdated information); they, in turn, charge others to use their lists. The Academy long has turned a blind eye to such practices, but now has decided to take control of the situation. With the Academy overseeing outreach, its members — whose numbers have skyrocketed in recent years as the organization has become more diverse and international — will no longer be badgered each year by multiple parties to confirm or update their contact information; and awards consultants will be able to rest assured that their mailings are reaching their desired audience. It is expected that the Academy — like SAG-AFTRA, the DGA and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences — will take a fee for each use of its mailing service, above and beyond the cost of the mailing itself. The exact fees were not immediately available, and the Academy did not respond to a request for comment about the new policy.

Turns out BJ Blazkowicz, Commander Keen, and "Doomguy" could all go to the same family reunion. Of all the innovations id Software delivered to the video game industry in the '90s, plot certainly wasn't one of them. Still, the company managed to create a few iconic heroes in its PC-action heyday, and decades after their creation, the company's former bigwigs let loose a fun bit of trivia on Tuesday: many of id's biggest heroes are all related. As spotted by ResetERA, a Twitter conversation unfolded on Tuesday that had been set into motion weeks earlier. A seeming throwaway December post from former id Software designer John Romero included an interesting note: that the long-running Wolfenstein series' hero, BJ Blazkowicz, was "based on" the company's early side-scrolling action series Commander Keen. A fan picked up on this and sent a question to id co-founder Tom Hall: are these two characters related, and is Doom's "Doomguy" hero also part of a genetic lineage? Hall minced no words in his Tuesday reply: "The lineage isn't a theory. Fact." Longtime id fans might have already suspected this, based on information in a long-ago Wolfenstein hint manual, but this is the first time someone from id has gone to the trouble of confirming that idea. What's more, Romero piped up to clarify the exact makeup of the Blazkowicz clan: the Wolfenstein hero is Commander Keen's grandfather, while Keen is Doomguy's dad. The duo had a bit of a back-and-forth joke chain from there, asking why there was a missing generational badass between Wolfenstein and Keen. Hall claimed that Keen's father was "an awesome, heroic... newscaster" with the stage name of "Blaze," which is where Keen's legal name of "Billy Blaze" came from. This adds a bit of a macabre angle to the fact that Keen-related Easter eggs could be found in the Doom series, particularly a secret room in Doom II that required you to gorily kill four hanging versions of the original Keen sprite. Tuesday's trivia tidbit comes after Romero’s admission in July 2017 that he played a key role in the iconic cover art for the first Doom game. That standing-on-corpses, aiming-a-gun pose came because Romero himself jumped into a photo shoot and posed the way he wanted the cover to look. (Doesn’t that kind of make Romero a member of the Blazkowicz clan, then?) Ultimately, with so little sensible plot connecting these games, the information is more of a fun way to look at those series' connections than a major concept-explaining revelation. It's all much less complicated than, say, the Zelda series chronology, which splits into three discrete timelines after the events of Ocarina of Time.

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After blocking several Pirate Bay clone sites following requests from rightsholders, T-Mobile in Austria has reported itself over a potential net neutrality breach. EU law says that pirate sites can be blocked but the ISP is concerned that doing so without a court order could be a breach of the Telecom Single Market (TSM) Regulation passed in 2015. For the past eight years, Austria has been struggling with the thorny issue of pirate site blocking. Local ISPs have put up quite a fight but site blocking is now a reality, albeit with a certain amount of confusion. After a dizzying route through the legal system, last November the Supreme Court finally ruled that The Pirate Bay and other “structurally-infringing” sites including 1337x.to and isohunt.to can be blocked, if rightsholders have exhausted all other options. The Court based its decision on the now-familiar BREIN v Filmspeler and BREIN v Ziggo and XS4All cases that received European Court of Justice rulings last year. However, there is now an additional complication, this time on the net neutrality front. After being passed in October 2015 and coming into force in April 2016, the Telecom Single Market (TSM) Regulation established the principle of non-discriminatory traffic management in the EU. The regulation still allows for the blocking of copyright-infringing websites but only where supported by a clear administrative or judicial decision. This is where T-Mobile sees a problem. In addition to blocking sites named specifically by the court, copyright holders also expect the ISP to block related platforms, such as clones and mirrors, that aren’t specified in the same manner. So, last week, after blocking several obscure Pirate Bay clones such as proxydl.cf, the ISP reported itself to the Austrian Regulatory Authority for Broadcasting and Telecommunications (RTR) for a potential net neutrality breach. “It sounds paradoxical, but this should finally bring legal certainty in a long-standing dispute over pirate sites. T-Mobile Austria has filed with regulatory authority RTR a kind of self-report, after blocking several sites on the basis of a warning by rights holders,” T-Mobile said in a statement. “The background to the communication to the RTR, through which T-Mobile intends to obtain an assessment by the regulator, is a very unsatisfactory legal situation in which operators have no opportunity to behave in conformity with the law. “The service provider is forced upon notification by the copyright owner to even judge about possible copyright infringements. At the same time, the provider is violating the principle of net neutrality by setting up a ban.” T-Mobile says the problem is complicated by rightsholders who, after obtaining a blocking order forcing named ISPs to block named pirate sites (as required under EU law), send similar demands to other ISPs that were not party to court proceedings. The rightsholders also send blocking demands when blocked sites disappear and reappear under a new name, despite those new names not being part of the original order. According to industry body Internet Service Providers Austria (ISPA), there is a real need for clarification. It’s hoped that T-Mobile reporting itself for a potential net neutrality breach will have the desired effect. “For more than two years, we have been trying to find a solution with the involved interest groups and the responsible ministry, which on the one hand protects the rights of the artists and on the other hand does not force the providers into the role of a judge,” complains Maximilian Schubert, Secretary General of the ISPA. “The willingness of the rights holders to compromise had remained within manageable limits. Now they are massively increasing the pressure and demanding costly measures, which the service providers see as punishment for them providing legal security for their customers for many years.” ISPA hopes that the telecoms regulator will now help to clear up this uncertainty. “We now hope that the regulator will give a clear answer here. Because from our point of view, the assessment of legality cannot and should not be outsourced to companies,” Schubert concludes. Source: Torrentfreak.com

Two broadband providers, BT and sibling EE, have today gone to the Supreme Court in London to appeal two key aspects of an earlier ruling, which forced major UK ISPs to start blocking websites that were found to sell counterfeit goods (i.e. abuse of Trade Mark). Previously major ISPs like BT, Virgin Media, Sky Broadband and TalkTalk could only be forced, via a court order, to block websites if they were found to facilitate internet copyright infringement (piracy) under Section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act. But in 2014 the High Court extended this to include sites that sell counterfeit goods (here) and thus abuse company trademarks (logos). The providers initially appealed this decision, not least by stating that Cartier and Montblanc (they raised the original case) had provided “no evidence” that their networks were being abused to infringe Trade Marks and that the UK Trade Mark Act did not include a provision for website blocking. Not to mention the unlikely risk that such a law could be applied in an overzealous way (imagine eBay being blocked due to a dodgy seller). On top of that the providers’ also noted that such sites weren’t heavily used, unlike the major piracy havens that have already been restricted, and thus they felt as if it would not be proportionate for them to suffer the costs involved. As we’ve previously reported, website blocking is anything but cheap and that often goes for both the ISPs and Rights Holders (here). In April 2016 this case went to the Court of Appeal (London) and the ISPs lost (here) but it now looks as if some of them didn’t completely give up. Today the Supreme Court began hearing a new appeal from BT and EE (Case ID: UKSC 2016/0159), which challenges two aspects of the related blocking order. Once again Cartier International AG, Monblac-Simplo and Richemont Int Ag are opposing. Case summary Issue(s) * The threshold conditions for the imposition of an order requiring internet service providers (“ISPs”) to block or attempt to block access to websites infringing registered trademarks; * Whether ISPs, as innocent parties, should be required to bear the costs of such blocking orders. Facts The appellant ISPs were ordered to block or attempt to block access to certain websites advertising and selling counterfeit copies of goods to which the respondents owned the trademarks. The orders, the first of their kind, were made under s. 37(1) of the Senior Courts Act 1981, Article 11 of Directive 2004/48/EC on the enforcement of intellectual property rights (which obliges Member States to ensure rightholders are able to apply for an injunction against intermediaries whose services are used by a third party to infringe an intellectual property right) not having been implemented in domestic law. The judge held that although the ISPs were not guilty of any wrongdoing, they were inevitable and essential actors in the infringing activities of the websites in question. The ISPs were also required to bear the costs of implementing the orders. The Court of Appeal dismissed the appeals of the ISPs in their entirety. The case appears to be a new approach to fighting an old argument, although given previous rulings we rather suspect that the ISPs may face an uphill struggle. Mind you they do have a very valid point about being “innocent parties” and related costs could easily get out of control, particularly if providers are forced to block lots of relatively minor websites.

Musician and writer Damon Krukowski explains how streaming services are failing artists and listeners, and what we can do to fight back. In 2012, I wrote a piece for this website breaking down the payments my first band, Galaxie 500, was receiving from streaming services, which were just starting to become a dominant force in the music industry. Spotify had sent songwriting royalties of $1.05 for the 5,960 times our single “Tugboat” was played that quarter—split between the group’s three members, each of us had made 35 cents. Not exactly a promising new source of income. For years, disruptive digital businesses have countered complaints like mine with assurances that everything will be different in the future, once millions and millions of people around the world adopt their application. Well, here we are. Spotify now claims 140 million active users, 70 million of whom are paid subscribers, and the total consumption of audio streams in the U.S. jumped by an estimated 50 percent last year. But while it’s clear that some are earning significant paychecks from streaming as a result—“Happy days are here again,” Billboard gushed last March, reporting the fastest growth for the industry in decades—most musicians are not. The basic reason is simple: According to the data trackers at BuzzAngle Music, more than 99 percent of audio streaming is of the top 10 percent most-streamed tracks. Which means less than 1 percent of streams account for all other music. That makes streaming more concentrated at the top than current album or song sales. Of course, the most popular releases have always dominated the music market, but it seems these new services increase that disparity rather than reduce it. The rising tide is lifting only certain boats. What is to be done? Spotify, Apple Music, and the other corporations seeking to control music consumption aren’t likely to change their trajectory. So what follows are some thoughts about ways we might adjust—as both creators and consumers of all music, not just the top 10 percent of it—in order to counterbalance a system built for the benefit of a small minority. There are no quick fixes, which is also the point: It’s the dream of quick fixes—and fortunes—that got us into this mess. If we’re going to find our way out, it’s going to be through slow collective effort, based on a better understanding of what we’re being offered now and exactly how and why that’s failing us. An Issue of Scale Tech startups are always faced with the same question: Will it scale? Digital media provides immediate access to a global set of users—an unimaginable opportunity in the analog era, but one that we now take for granted. However, as venture capitalists have learned, it’s only the rare idea for a product or service that can successfully function at such a huge scale. And it’s precisely those ideas that have come to monopolize our digital environment. It’s survival of the scalable. But does everything we want from music necessarily scale up? Consider live music. If you’ve seen the same band in both a small club and a big outdoor festival, you know how different each experience can be. That’s true for the performers’ experience as well. And not all aspects of live music can survive such a shift. You don’t hear a lot of bands talk about this, but in the final act of the compelling new Grateful Dead documentary, Long Strange Trip, there is a remarkably frank discussion of the band’s experience playing massive shows in the late 1980s and ’90s. “In the stadiums you have no contact with your audience, it’s just not possible,” says bassist Phil Lesh. Drummer Bill Kreutzmann adds, “There were 60,000 people there, but basically you didn’t have any touch with those people—they were hundreds of feet away from you.” The Grateful Dead—the quintessential live band to its many fans—had slowly scaled up the size of their shows to a point where they could no longer maintain the same connection with their audience. Many of their diehard followers stopped buying tickets to those stadium shows altogether and just gathered in the parking lots outside instead. There, they could continue the rituals they had developed together at a smaller scale. As a devotee of punk and post-punk in the ’80s, I never thought I would say this, but those Deadheads who partied in the parking lots may have been showing us the way. If what we value in music is lost at the scale it’s being offered to us, we need to find other ways to get what we want from it. So, on a practical level, you might want to think twice before plunking down big bucks for that next festival ticket. If you want to see the headliner on a huge stage, from hundreds of feet away, together with tens of thousands of others, then, OK—Coachella may be your best bet. But if you want to see those bands in the small type on the poster—who may not get paid much more for a festival performance than they would for their own headlining set at a club, where you could see them better, they could see you, and you would pay a whole lot less to boot—maybe you should just hang in the parking lot. Adjusting our purchases to the scale that makes sense for what we’re really after is one way to work around the Spotify/Apple Music model. Just as at a big festival, if what you want is what only these huge corporations can offer, then your subscription money is well spent. But if you’re using a streaming service to listen to anything other than the most-streamed tracks, your money isn’t supporting what you’re hearing. Context Is King With more and more users, streaming services have access to huge amounts of data, increasing the predictive power of their recommendations. But while streaming media is pitched to us as tailored to our taste, or at least to our browsing history, the business of it is in fact closer to one-size-fits-all. Streaming is so heavily weighted in favor of the most popular tracks because that’s how the model is designed to work: Nearly everyone using the service is meant to use it nearly the same way. Imagine the opposite—countless different individuals asking to stream countless different albums from different eras, all at the same moment. It’s easy to picture, because this is the image of streaming services that we are sold. But the reality is something else again. Consider the dominant streaming video service, Netflix, which now has more subscribers than all cable providers combined. While Netflix has grown more popular, it has diminished its content to the point where it recently hosted only 25 movies made before 1950, as Zach Schonfeld pointed out in Newsweek. “It’s the sort of classics selection you’d expect to find in a decrepit video store in 1993,” Schonfeld wrote, “not on a leading entertainment platform that serves some 100 million global subscribers.” The streaming music catalog is currently in a much better state. But it could only be a matter of time until these companies lose interest in the 90 percent of music that doesn’t return even 1 percent of their gross. It seems likely that they will eventually jettison these less-played tracks for different content—just look at Netflix. Or look now at how badly their applications already serve entire genres of less popular music. Spotify lists recordings by song title, album title, or featured artist name. But that information is so limited it leaves out even the other performers on a recording, a crucial aspect to classical and jazz. For that matter, performers are kind of important to rock, too! Not to mention songwriters, producers, engineers, publishers, record labels—almost all the labor that goes into making recordings is erased from the databases used by the major streaming services. Why hide all that information, all that context to each recording? Digital services are so good at handling massive amounts of data—just think how much Spotify knows about each of us. And yet they can’t bring themselves to specify which of the radically different Miles Davis Quintets played on which album—is it the one with John Coltrane and Philly Joe Jones, or the one with Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams? One reason for this glaring omission of musical data may be a reluctance to acknowledge all the copyright holders actually connected to the recordings they stream. In fact, this is the basis of the lawsuits Spotify has faced (and is facing) from music publishers, including a $1.6 billion filing from Wixen Music this December. Incredibly, one of Spotify’s existing defenses against such accusations of unpaid royalties has been a lack of information. “Spotify has acknowledged lapses in obtaining mechanical rights due to the difficulty of identifying and locating the co-authors of each of the tens of millions of copyrighted musical works throughout its streaming platform,” The Hollywood Reporter’s Eriq Gardner explained last fall. How the same company building a reputation as the best and biggest at handling music data can claim that they can’t cope with all that music data strains credibility—especially if, as Gardner also reported, their fallback legal argument may be that they don’t owe songwriters any royalties anyway. But there seems to be another, deeper motive for streaming companies to eliminate existing context for recordings: They want to replace it with their own. The rise of playlists, recently analyzed in a superb piece written for The Baffler by Liz Pelly, makes the platform itself the primary context for any music on it. Information is so lacking for the individual tracks on playlists, some of the most listened to are by musicians who don’t even exist. (And who therefore won’t be asking for royalties, or suing when they don’t arrive.) These so-called “fake artists”—in reality, commissioned works owned by Spotify—eliminate the problem of researching even the bare bones of identifying data, like artist and title. When Bill Gates proclaimed in 1996 that, on the internet, “Content Is King,” he didn’t foresee that content creators would be bypassed by the information platforms to come. Indeed the same Gates article goes on to declare, in a much less quoted passage, that, “For the internet to thrive, content providers must be paid for their work.” At the time, Gates predicted that micropayments would eventually solve the practical problem of how to link online users and creators financially. We have that technology now—but we also have massively capitalized platforms monopolizing access to content, with no interest in encouraging those micropayments. But Bill Gates was right all along—content is king—and what’s more, content belongs to its creators. It’s only the deliberate erasure of context that removes the control we have over our work. And context doesn’t disappear on its own. It’s always there for us to declare, maintain, and restore if removed. So make noise about context, because when you do, you are valuing the labor that goes into making music. Tell us who played on that track, who wrote it, who produced it, who put it out. Discogs has become a great repository of information like this for existing records. And Bandcamp makes room for all this info in a streaming platform, no less. Music publications and blogs have always been an excellent source for contextual information too. Can simply sharing information with one another combat the power of companies like Spotify and Apple? I believe it can, and does. There’s no better evidence, perhaps, than the forces that continually rally against it. The Future of Music Is Free One of the most telling instances of the threat to power represented by sharing information was the arrest and prosecution of Aaron Swartz, the internet activist who took his own life five years ago. Swartz’s “crime” was downloading academic papers from published journals in the MIT Library and distributing them online for free. His Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, written in 2008, is a clarion call for sharing information as a political act. “Information is power,” it begins. “But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. [...] Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it—their shareholders would revolt at anything less.” To fight that greed, and free the power of information for use by all, Swartz advocated piracy. Because, he said, “Sharing isn’t immoral—it’s a moral imperative.” Maybe Swartz sounds hopelessly pie-in-the-sky to you, like an ’80s Deadhead in a stadium parking lot. But the federal government didn’t think so. On the contrary, they took him very, very seriously. And so do I. For that matter, I take those Deadheads in the parking lot seriously too. What they have in common is that they took a stand outside the corporate structure and, from that vantage point, saw it for what it is: a structure. A model. And hardly the only possible one. The masquerade of streaming services is that they seem like a model of sharing. Spotify is even “free,” if you consider listening to ads and having your tastes monitored as free. And yet, these services are run by large corporations “blinded by greed,” as Swartz put it—the antithesis (and very much the enemy) of truly free sharing. Streaming services’ surface resemblance to sharing is no coincidence, because they can trace their roots directly to Napster, the original pirate in the field. Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning was never political like Aaron Swartz, but his peer-to-peer software was also revolutionary in its opposition to intellectual property. Fanning was taken to court for it too, though in a civil procedure rather than criminal—as a result, he didn’t face jail time like Swartz. But his creation was destroyed, bankrupted in 2002 through lawsuits brought by the major labels. Apple stepped into the space Napster created with the launch of its iTunes Store the very next year. And here we are, sharing music much as Fanning envisioned—but with the crucial difference that it is not peer-to-peer, and not truly free. You might say Apple, Spotify, and the major labels who invested in their success have stripped away the context of Napster, leaving us with just its content. A content that they now assert control over. And profit from. But that content remains ours. It’s created by musicians, and listeners. And we can use it elsewhere. In fact, we can use it to build competing models. We’re doing this already, each time we share music with one another through a different system. Bandcamp is one healthy model, earning money for artists without stripping their music of its context, or their control. And so, I would say, is simply sharing music with one another for free. I know that sounds pie-in-the-sky again. But consider this: On Bandcamp, I run a page for Galaxie 500, and a page for the records with my current project, Damon & Naomi. On the Galaxie 500 page, we charge a price for all downloads. On the Damon & Naomi page, all downloads are free, or pay-as-you-wish. And even though the Damon & Naomi albums are generally less popular than the Galaxie 500 ones—and have never sold as well in physical formats—guess which Bandcamp page earns more? The free one. There’s another current model that makes me think musicians might find new solutions to our financial problems by, paradoxically, giving up on earning royalties from streaming. This past year I became something of an accidental podcaster, producing a six-episode series for Radiotopia and PRX called “Ways of Hearing.” And in the podcast world I found a thriving digital audio format, distributed entirely for free; the Radiotopia network’s 16 shows collectively garner 18 million downloads per month. It’s not that podcasters and podcast producers aren’t concerned with developing sources of income—like musicians, they are constantly engaged with the issue of how to earn a living from their audio files. But unlike music makers and record labels, podcasters have no hesitation sharing their work for free, simply because that’s been a given for their format from the start. While podcasting makes full use of Apple and Spotify—and any and all other available channels—for distribution, it doesn’t look to them to provide financial solutions for their industry. Because all these downloads are free, podcasters are instead finding multiple other ways to support their work. Not that the specific strategies they hit upon necessarily apply directly to music—nonprofits like Radiotopia use a public radio-style combination of grants, sponsorships, and listener donations, while for-profit podcast networks like Gimlet rely on ads and brand partnerships. But what is striking is how they and so many others in the booming podcast field are dreaming up ways to make digital audio work, without full dependence on these massive companies. Another World Is Possible The actions outlined here may seem very small in comparison to the power of a corporation like Spotify, whose upcoming IPO is expected to be valued at as much as $19 billion, much less that of the biggest tech company in the world, Apple. But small movements can read from the stage if you’re in a small venue; small type on the cover of an LP speaks loud and clear if you’re staring at it while you listen to the record. The small gestures we make directly to one another are real. And sharing is a beautiful gesture. It might be the most fundamental gesture behind all music. So share your money deliberately when you spend it on music, and it will be a real gesture with a real effect. Share the context of your information online, and its content won’t be stripped from you. And share your music—for free. It’s a powerful action, powerful enough that the biggest corporations in the world feel threatened by it. Let them.

@#$****'s Euterpe Pick Roy Wood - Boulders [1973] Rock | Pop Rock | 1970's Discogs AMG Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote: An intricate, deliberately idiosyncratic record, assembled piece by piece, Boulders perfectly captures Roy Wood's peculiar genius, more so than anything else he recorded. All of his obsessions are here -- classical music, psychedelia, pre-Beatles pop, pastoral folk ballads, absurdist humor, studio trickery, and good old-fashioned rock & roll -- assembled in a gracefully eccentric fashion. Some listeners may find that eccentricity a little alienating, but it's the core of Wood's music. He wrote tuneful, accessible songs, but indulged his passions and weird ideas, so even the loveliest melodies and catchiest hooks are dressed in colorful, odd arrangements. The marvelous thing is, these arrangements never sound self-consciously weird - it's the sound of Wood's music in full bloom. Never before and never again did his quirks sound so charming, even thrilling, as they do on Boulders. As soon as "Songs of Praise" reaches its chorus, a choir of sped-up, multi-tracked Roys kick in, sending it into the stratosphere. All nine tunes unwind in a similar fashion, each blessed with delightfully unpredictable twists. It's easy to spot the tossed-off jokes on the goofy "When Gran'ma Plays the Banjo," but it may take several spins to realize that the percussion on "Wake Up" is the sound of Roy slapping a bowl of water. Boulders is a sonic mosaic -- you can choose to wonder at the little details or gaze at the glorious whole, enjoying the shape it forms. Wood has an unerring knack for melodies, whether they're in folk ballads, sweet pop or old-fashioned rock & rollers, yet his brilliance is how he turns the hooks 180 degrees until they're gloriously out of sync with his influences and peers. Boulders still sounds wonderfully out of time and it's easy to argue that it's the peak of his career. My Note:- Album is free-leech. download this as fast a possible to increase ratios..